It may not make much sense, but the phrase ‘pad kid poured curd pulled cold’ completely defeated volunteers taking part in a U.S. speech study.

Asked to repeat the phrase 10 times at a fast lick, many of the participants clammed up and stopped talking altogether, according to lead researcher Dr Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston…

The tongue twister study, presented at the annual meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in San Francisco, was conducted to shed light on the brain’s speech-planning processes.

‘When things go wrong, that can tell you something about how the typical, error-free operation should go,’ said Dr Shattuck-Hufnagel.

Spoken too quickly, certain combinations of sounds appear to make people lose control of their mouths.